| The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew | |
|---|---|
| Italian: La Crocifissione di Sant'Andrea, Spanish: La Crucifixión de San Andrés | |
 | |
| Artist | Caravaggio |
| Year | 1607 |
| Medium | oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 202.5 cm × 152.7 cm (79.7 in × 60.1 in) |
| Location | Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio |
The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew (1607) is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio. It is in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, which acquired it from the Arnaiz collection in Madrid in 1976, having been taken to Spain by the Spanish Viceroy of Naples in 1610.[1]
The incident depicted, the martyrdom of Saint Andrew, was supposed to have taken place in Patras, Greece. The saint, bound to the cross with ropes, was said to have survived two days, preaching to the crowd and eventually converting them so that they demanded his release.[2] When the Roman Proconsul Aegeas[3]—depicted lower right—ordered him taken down, his men were struck by a miraculous paralysis, in answer to the saint's prayer that he be allowed to undergo martyrdom.[4]
From the 17th century Saint Andrew was shown on a diagonal cross, but Caravaggio would have been influenced by the 16th century belief that he was crucified on a normal Latin cross.
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Transcription
SPEAKER 1: We're in Santa Maria del Popolo. SPEAKER 2: In Rome. SPEAKER 1: Looking at one of the great Caravaggios of the Baroque. SPEAKER 2: This may actually be my favorite Caravaggio, although I think I said about the last Caravaggio we did. SPEAKER 1: You may have. This is the "Crucifixion of St. Peter." You know, we talk about the diagonals of the Baroque and the sense of action in the momentary. But Caravaggio just makes that seem so pedestrian. It's such an activated, complex set of movements and weights. SPEAKER 2: Counter-movements. SPEAKER 1: And yes. And gravity plays this intense role. SPEAKER 2: Very, very, very powerful feeling of the pull of gravity. But what gets me is Peter. Caravaggio went out onto the street and got a guy. SPEAKER 1: He's a real and powerful, intense figure. And he looks really crabby, just the way Peter should be. Now, the story of course is that Peter-- SPEAKER 2: He asked to be crucified not the way that Christ did. SPEAKER 1: That's right. So upside-down. SPEAKER 2: So they're turning the cross upside-down, right? Look at him. He looks poor and kind of messy. SPEAKER 1: Not idealized at all. SPEAKER 2: No. SPEAKER 1: This is in such contrast to the pomp and ceremony. SPEAKER 2: He's a guy hanging out in a bar in Rome. SPEAKER 1: Well, that's what Caravaggio is so well known for. It's all the pomp and ceremony of Rome, of the Catholic Church is here turned on its head by Caravaggio. Think about this in contrast to the medieval traditions where there's no sense of gravity, no sense of weight, no sense of physicality. I mean, we're really seeing the ramifications of the Renaissance, but the brought into the Baroque era with a kind of intense emotionalism and physicality that even puts the Renaissance to shame. SPEAKER 2: Yeah. Oh, and shoved in your face. The guy who's lifting the cross , he's got all the way under it and is hoisting it with his back. We see his butt in our face. We see his legs, his dirty feet. SPEAKER 1: That's right. And this notion of really pushing out past the picture plane into our face is absolutely-- SPEAKER 2: Right. Into the space-- into our space. SPEAKER 1: And look at the diagonal of Peter has his feet comes towards us. SPEAKER 2: Yeah. SPEAKER 1: You're absolutely right. It breaks out into our world. SPEAKER 2: Right. And in fact, the cross as it moves out into our space by his feet, gives us a very close up view of the nails. There's a kind way that it gets to you in your body so that you almost go "ugh, agh." SPEAKER 1: Yeah. There's all this tension, actually. SPEAKER 2: You can feel that. The nail through his hands is all very, very real and descriptive. And the way that there's that black background. SPEAKER 1: Because light is really emphasizing what you're talking about. They way in which the knees protrude, the way in which the body is sort of pushed forward. All of that is highly controlled by the way that the light is played here. SPEAKER 2: And on his abdomen and his knees, they make his body look very normal. Like it's a regular man's body. So different than the kinds of bodies we're used to seeing in the Renaissance. SPEAKER 1: It's true, although there is a kind of heroicism here in terms of its mass and its strength. But it's only expressed through-- SPEAKER 2: Belied a little bit by the face though, I think, which looks so vulnerable. SPEAKER 1: It's true. There is this kind of incredible tension, because you're right. All the forces of nature play here. And we're not quite sure if that rope is strong enough. We're not quite sure if those men are strong enough. It may just fall. SPEAKER 2: It may. The whole thing could collapse at any second. SPEAKER 1: Absolutely. There's this kind of sense of transience in the momentary. SPEAKER 2: And sort of human frailty, you know. SPEAKER 1: That's right. In a sense, Caravaggio's brilliance is to be able to create this sense of newness and freshness, and as if this hadn't been rehearsed hundreds of times in paintings for hundreds of years. SPEAKER 2: I know, but no one did it like this. SPEAKER 1: It's as if it's the first time. SPEAKER 2: Yeah.
History
On 11 July 1610 Juan Alonso Pimentel de Herrera, 5th Duke of Benavente, left Naples for Spain, having served as viceroy of that city for seven years. With him he a took a painting Giovanni Pietro Bellori described as "la Crocifissione di Santo Andrea".[5][6] The painting was installed at the family palace in Valladolid, where it was appraised, in 1653,[a] at 1,500 ducats, by far the highest value painting in the family collection.[7] The occasion for the appraisal came with the death of the 7th Duke of Benavente in December 1652.
The appraiser was Diego Valentín Díaz who described the work as "a large painting of a nude St Andrew when he is being put on the cross with three executioners and a woman, with an ebony frame"[b] and it is attributed to "micael angel caraballo". This painting was almost certainly commissioned by the viceroy, who was especially devoted to Saint Andrew and played a role in renovating the crypt of Saint Andrew in the Amalfi Cathedral.[3]
The Valladolid painting is thought to be the same as the present work, acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1976. There are three other versions of the composition: one (198 x 147.5 cm) formerly part of the Back-Vega collection, Vienna,[8] and now part of the Spier Collection, London, attributed to Caravaggio between 1954 – 1973 by some art historians such as Giuseppe Fiocco, Hermann Voss and Antonio Morassi, and considered a copy (by Louis Finson) by others, especially after the rediscovery of the version now in Cleveland in 1974. Since 2011, the former Back-Vega exemplar has again been attributed to Caravaggio, as a second version.[9][10][11] The other two exemplars are undisputed copies: one (232.5 x 160 cm) at the Museo de Santa Cruz, Toledo (Spain), discovered by Roberto Longhi in 1920, which was much ruined during the Spanish Civil War and whose authorship is uncertain; the other one (209 x1 51.5 cm) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon (France), long attributed to Abraham Vinck and considered to have been painted by Louis Finson since 2011.[12] This specific version was first given to Caravaggio by Benedict Nicolson in 1974.[13]
See also
Notes
References
- ^ "The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew Italy, Naples | Cleveland Museum of Art". www.clevelandart.org. Retrieved 21 March 2024.
- ^ In Monumenta Germaniae Historica II, cols. 821–847, translated in M.R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford) reprinted 1963:369.
- ^ a b Graham-Dixon, Andrew (2011). Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. Penguin Books Limited. ISBN 9780241954645.
- ^ Langdon, Helen (2000). Caravaggio: A Life. Westview Press. ISBN 9780813337944.
- ^ Bellori, Giovanni (1672). Le vite de' pittori, scultori et architetti moderni. Rome: Mascardi. p. 214.
- ^ Bellori, Giovanni Pietro (2005). Hellmut Wohl (ed.). Giovanni Pietro Bellori: The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects: A New Translation and Critical Edition. Cambridge University Press. p. 185. ISBN 9780521781879. Retrieved 26 June 2013.
- ^ Tzeutschler Lurie, Ann; Denis Mahon (January 1977). "Caravaggio's Crucifixion of Saint Andrew from Valladolid". The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art. 64 (1): 2–24. JSTOR 25152672.
- ^ Back-Vega, Emmerich; Christa Back-Vega (March 1958). "A Lost Masterpiece by Caravaggio". The Art Bulletin. 40 (1): 65–66. doi:10.2307/3047748. JSTOR 3047748.
- ^ Papi, Gianni (2016). CARAVAGGIO: La crocifissione di Sant'Andrea Back-Vega: The Back-Vega Crucifixion of St. Andrew. Milan: Skira. ISBN 9788857232379.
- ^ Una vita per la storia dell’arte: scritti in memoria di Maurizio Marini curated by Pietro Loreto; etgraphiae 2015: contribution by Pierluigi Carofano pp. 104-109 (with citations and references: in particular to favorable opinions by Mina Gregori, Didier Bodart, Gianni Papi and Bruno Arciprete), pp. 116, 464. Favorable opinion also by count Daniele Radini Tedeschi (“Caravaggio o della Vulgata”, De Luca Editori d’Arte 2012, pp. 211–212, p. 245).
- ^ Da Finson a Caravaggio (with photograph taken after the restoration in 2013).
- ^ Répertoire des tableaux italiens dans les collections publiques françaises (XIIIe-XIX siècle), RETIF – INHA (with photograph):
- ^ Nicolson, Benedict (October 1974). "Caravaggio and the Caravaggesques: Some Recent Research". The Burlington Magazine. 116 (859): 565, 602–616, 622. JSTOR 877821.
Bibliography
- Benay, Erin (2017). Exporting Caravaggio: the Crucifixion of St. Andrew. ISBN 978-1911282242
- Gash, John (2004). Caravaggio. ISBN 1-904449-22-0.
External links
Media related to Crucifixion of Saint Andrew by Caravaggio at Wikimedia Commons
This page was last edited on 21 March 2024, at 18:05